(4)
Upon arriving home from the hospital, I found that my family lived in an urban setting, several blocks north of a prestigious university. Our spacious, two bedroom apartment sat on the top floor of a massive, three-story, brown brick building, which wraps around the corner of a quiet intersection to this very day.
At the time of my birth, ‘white flight’ will not have transformed our lovely, middle-class, culturally mixed neighborhood into the lower income ghetto that it was fated to become. (Several years ago, curiosity drove me to check out our old stamping grounds, and much to my delight, I found that social awareness and urban renewal had restored a cultural mix to the neighborhood of my youth. I also learned that our spacious, two bedroom apartment had been divided into smaller units where university students eat, sleep, study, and party, today.)
Upon arriving home from the hospital, I found that my family lived in an urban setting, several blocks north of a prestigious university. Our spacious, two bedroom apartment sat on the top floor of a massive, three-story, brown brick building, which wraps around the corner of a quiet intersection to this very day.
At the time of my birth, ‘white flight’ will not have transformed our lovely, middle-class, culturally mixed neighborhood into the lower income ghetto that it was fated to become. (Several years ago, curiosity drove me to check out our old stamping grounds, and much to my delight, I found that social awareness and urban renewal had restored a cultural mix to the neighborhood of my youth. I also learned that our spacious, two bedroom apartment had been divided into smaller units where university students eat, sleep, study, and party, today.)
If you asked me to describe the first two years of my life in twenty words or less, I'd say: My smile seemed to be the sunshine around which my adoring family revolved.
Then, as change is the only constant in life, an unexpected change took place that knocked me off my pedestal. The unexpected nature of this change led to many more changes until dark clouds of confusion and stormy tears replaced sunny smiles with grievous frowns, all around.
At the time of our family’s tragedy, my maternal grandmother lived with my parents and not quite three-year old me. Grandma Ella, who’d been raised in a Russian shtetl (a small Jewish ghetto), was a good looking, robust woman who'd mixed music and dancing into her cooking and baking.
One look at my brown eyed, brunette grandma made it plain to see why she'd deemed herself the ‘gonsa baleboste’ (number one mistress of the house). Each time her animated spirit flew around the kitchen, pots, pans, and rolling pins came to life. She was a strong-willed woman, who often spoke before filtering her thoughts, and though I don’t believe my grandma meant to wound anyone she loved, a dollop of humility would have sweetened many a conversation, that's for sure.
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